0:00:00.100,0:00:03.327 14 July 2011 0:00:05.573,0:00:10.377 To me, personally, the future. That is, I don’t see much today. 0:00:10.377,0:00:16.149 When I write, better that I’m thinking that Cuba will be different in 7 to 10 years. 0:00:16.149,0:00:28.362 As for specific stories, what I like most is to write chronicles of the street, especially in the slums… I was born in a slum. 0:00:28.362,0:00:38.940 About the hookers, the losers, little things, I’m not so pretentious as to think that with a story I can reflect Cuban reality. 0:00:38.940,0:00:49.279 Instead I try to reflect what I see, or a part of reality, above all Havana’s reality. That’s what I mostly write, it’s where I live. 0:00:49.586,0:00:53.137 Q: How many years total have you been a journalist? 0:00:53.522,0:00:59.629 I started out in independent journalism in December 1996, it would be 15 years. 0:00:59.629,0:01:02.926 No, in December 1995, so 16 years now. 0:01:02.926,0:01:09.703 In an agency -- Cuba Press -- founded by Raul Rivero, a poet and journalist still living, who lives in Madrid. 0:01:09.703,0:01:15.909 I did that until 2003 and since then I do journalism on my own. 0:01:15.909,0:01:21.966 Above all I think the biggest challenge is the lack of information you have. 0:01:21.966,0:01:31.959 That is, the journalist in Cuba generally has no access to government sources, you have to rely on feature stories or opinion articles. 0:01:31.959,0:01:41.471 You can’t do a big story because there’s no balance… so you have to fall back on feature stories, testimonials and articles of opinion. 0:01:41.471,0:01:47.741 And the other is ... not in my case… but for independent journalists it’s the problem of money. 0:01:47.741,0:01:54.881 Most are very poorly paid and have a lot of problems accessing the Internet. 0:01:54.881,0:02:00.047 They have to go to embassies, to the United States Interest Section here in Havana. 0:02:00.047,0:02:04.692 I think those are the great challenges of independent journalism in Cuba. 0:02:04.923,0:02:15.802 In particular I don’t think that a government, whether it’s the United States or Tonga, has the right to intervene… 0:02:15.802,0:02:28.181 … with the greatest reason in the world, to transplant democracy in Cuba, in the internal issues of a country. Personally I don’t think it’s right. 0:02:28.181,0:02:38.158 Now, from the point of view… trying to be as objective as possible, I think a political party or a group or any movement needs money, right? 0:02:38.158,0:02:40.589 Napoleon said it: money and more money. 0:02:40.589,0:02:47.501 And so the United States publicly supports dissident groups with money to promote the transition… 0:02:47.501,0:02:51.340 … and then those dissident groups in Cuba have to take that into account… 0:02:51.340,0:02:58.910 … above all they have to be more transparent with their own co-religionists, their followers, people who are in that party. 0:02:58.910,0:03:08.889 Because I imagine there are a lot of shady deals with 20 million, I suppose in the future when they have control of the public purse, they will plunder it, for sure. 0:03:08.889,0:03:15.860 I’m being optimistic if 5 million comes in, in equipment and things like that. 0:03:15.860,0:03:22.292 Also I would like to ask the U.S. government how 15 or 20 million can bring us democracy… 0:03:22.292,0:03:28.097 … because then who needs wars, a few million and you bring democracy to the distant countries that don’t have it. 0:03:28.097,0:03:33.090 Because if there is a point of agreement between me and the U.S. administrations it is that there is no democracy in Cuba. 0:03:33.090,0:03:39.882 But I don’t see how they can be effective with books, radios, laptops, how this is going to bring democracy. 0:03:39.882,0:03:46.736 I don’t know, I think that looking at it from their angle they think that they can help the work of a number of people here. 0:03:46.736,0:03:52.362 But I’m not sure where that money ends up. 0:03:52.362,0:04:00.607 Yes, there are many people who believe you shouldn’t accept money, any money, there are others who think it doesn’t matter, it’s their right. 0:04:00.607,0:04:08.348 I am among those who think they shouldn’t accept money, any money, not covert money from any government. 0:04:08.348,0:04:15.141 I simply prefer, at least if it’s needed, I know journalism is expensive, especially you need a laptop… 0:04:15.141,0:04:20.249 … a camera, that obviously you can’t buy with your salary… 0:04:20.249,0:04:32.504 …support from some foundation in the end, I don’t know, another way that it’s not openly money of a State, and especially that the State isn’t called “The United States.” 0:04:32.873,0:04:37.060 Look, I don’t have all the elements, to judge the policy of USAID. 0:04:37.060,0:04:44.584 Cuba is one of the many countries that USAID gives money to. I think there’s a list, I don’t know how many there could be. 0:04:44.584,0:04:53.293 I’ll tell you what has been shown to me… but no, that takes years, it would take 20 years or something like that. 0:04:53.293,0:05:03.137 That distinct, different administrations of the United States, award credit, or cash money, to groups like USAID, or even foundations. 0:05:03.137,0:05:12.512 The point of the money – which the government also handles… it know that of the opponents or dissidents, really, none are rich… 0:05:12.512,0:05:24.291 … independent journalists much less so. As I see it, it’s not effective. I don’t see why receiving more or less money can bring… 0:05:24.291,0:05:31.952 What effectiveness? I don’t see it; 15 or 20 years, I don’t see… that the result is something good, no? 0:05:31.952,0:05:40.985 I think it’s only served for propaganda for the government, against the opposition groups that receive it. 0:05:40.985,0:05:47.324 My question is, if the U.S. government didn’t give them money, would the opposition in Cuba disappear? 0:05:47.324,0:05:54.721 I don’t think so. And the government also argues against the embargo, which I don’t agree with, with the U.S. embargo against Cuba. 0:05:54.721,0:06:01.256 Because here in Cuba you can buy everything from information equipment to California apples… in hard currency. 0:06:01.256,0:06:06.032 The end of the embargo would benefit the government of Fidel Castro the most… 0:06:06.032,0:06:10.173 …when there is no Cuban economy it’s not going flourish, it’s not going to be like the Bahamas. 0:06:10.173,0:06:16.338 But then there is the vice versa: when there’s no money, credit won’t be granted to the Cuban dissidence... 0:06:16.354,0:06:19.546 ...and I think that even so the dissidence would continue to exist. 0:06:19.546,0:06:22.017 That’s my point of view, perhaps a little naïve. 0:06:23.583,0:06:26.589 It worries me, good question. 0:06:26.589,0:06:32.949 That is how I see it, perhaps if you’d asked me 25 years ago, perhaps I would have spoken very prettily about when there would be freedom for all… 0:06:32.949,0:06:40.869 … but today I am a little pessimistic, I think about the future of Cuba and it looks like Russia: State capitalism that is the worst version, no? 0:06:40.869,0:06:50.459 I see there are a number of military companies that are monopolizing all the businesses that exist here in Cuba, the few businesses that profit. 0:06:50.459,0:06:56.160 With an opposition that for me lacks a real reason for being, I always call it the banana dissidence… 0:06:56.160,0:07:02.322 … in the sense that it is directed more to the exterior than to the problems here, of their community, of their neighborhood. 0:07:02.322,0:07:08.002 They have to do the work of proselytizing more with the neighbor next door to them, than to some press conference … 0:07:08.002,0:07:12.648 … and projects that are more directed to the outside, they need to know their own country more. 0:07:12.648,0:07:14.878 Honestly, I don't think it looks good. 0:07:15.482,0:07:21.667 And also to the dissidence I tell them that politically they are talking with political cadavers… 0:07:21.667,0:07:24.267 …through a series of things that have come out in Wikileaks about corruption… 0:07:24.267,0:07:30.142 … about nepotism and the “strong-man” leadership that there is in some of the opposition groups. 0:07:30.142,0:07:41.624 I don’t think the future of Cuba… obviously for me… it simply looks bad. 0:07:42.147,0:07:47.580 What motivates me most is that I was born in a poor neighborhood, I was born in what was the Cerro neighborhood in Havana. 0:07:47.580,0:07:54.128 Today it’s Pilar Atare, which is probably one of the most marginal neighborhoods in the city. 0:07:54.128,0:07:56.643 Now I live in Vibora, which is not a marginal neighborhood… 0:07:56.643,0:08:02.749 … but where I move in the world is at the margins with people who have no options. 0:08:02.749,0:08:06.586 Or they haven’t known how to take advantage of them or they haven’t wanted to take advantage of them… 0:08:06.586,0:08:13.494 … [the world] of hookers, all the illegal businesses there are in Cuba, like [illegal satellite] antennas, like many things. 0:08:13.494,0:08:19.555 Of corrupt people… in short, I prefer to write about the losers, or about the winners when they start to lose. 0:08:21.239,0:08:25.568 That was the root of the Black Spring of 2003. 0:08:25.568,0:08:31.211 My mother was… or still is… at that time one of the most critical among the independent journalists. 0:08:31.211,0:08:43.656 Even Fidel Castro gave a hint some days before mentioning a number of people who had been to some kind of meeting… 0:08:43.656,0:08:46.721 … or some embassy reception, I think of the United States… 0:08:46.721,0:08:52.699 … in the house of the ambassador of the U.S. in Havana, and some days later it happened… 0:08:52.699,0:08:59.446 The raid against opponents and independent journalists started on March 18, and it seemed to me [my mother] should leave the country. 0:08:59.446,0:09:08.873 Obviously her days could have been numbered. And then we opened a map, a world map, and the country she liked was Switzerland. 0:09:08.873,0:09:13.239 She didn’t like anything about Miami, she wanted to be far from Cuba… the United States… 0:09:13.239,0:09:20.181 There were three women in this case. My mother was almost 60 then. 0:09:20.181,0:09:27.403 My sister who is not an opponent at all – she worked here like a normal person -- and my niece who was 8. 0:09:27.403,0:09:33.022 And they decided on Switzerland for the whole set of laws they have that support women, 0:09:33.022,0:09:40.824 …the welfare state that it is, a country more prudish but less violent perhaps, or less stressful, no? 0:09:40.824,0:09:44.484 As the United States could be, and is. 0:09:44.484,0:09:47.070 Neither good nor bad, just far from her country. 0:09:47.070,0:09:55.728 Something that I think doesn’t affect just me alone, there are something like 6 or 7 million Cubans who have someone on the other side of the river. 0:09:55.728,0:09:59.741 Or on that side of the Florida Straits. 0:10:00.141,0:10:02.140 Q: And how old is your mother now? 0:10:02.140,0:10:04.704 This year she will turn 69. 0:10:04.704,0:10:07.140 Yes, yes, she is much more active than me. 0:10:07.140,0:10:11.753 She writes much more, she writes for a lot of sites and of course you know… 0:10:11.753,0:10:16.536 … one’s homeland is not a disposable object you can throw out like some thing. 0:10:16.536,0:10:21.154 And I think she is still sleeping with the Malecon, and with black beans, that can’t be taken from her. 0:10:21.154,0:10:29.762 Because she’s been there nine years in Switzerland, this November it will be nine years but she’s still not fluent in German… 0:10:29.762,0:10:37.403 … that is clearly she continues to live in Havana, really she never left it. 0:10:37.403,0:10:44.210 Mainly what she does is ... I send all my [articles] to her, I have no [Internet] time ... as it’s journalism. 0:10:44.210,0:10:48.603 I send a package of articles and she goes to the distinct sites where she publishes them… 0:10:48.603,0:10:54.338 … the newspaper El Mundo of Spain, Diario de Cuba, the sites. 0:10:54.338,0:10:58.239 She proposes them and they choose the ones that interest them. 0:10:58.239,0:11:01.188 So that’s what she does with my work. Sometimes she puts the photos in… 0:11:01.188,0:11:08.521 Sometimes I tell her: Look, put some video, or she can change the title… she does some editing. 0:11:08.521,0:11:13.106 No, no, no. What influences me is the journalism… 0:11:13.106,0:11:19.114 … because my mother was a journalist in Cuba … official, working for the government for 40 years doing journalism. 0:11:19.114,0:11:26.753 She worked for the magazine Bohemia which is the only media that didn’t disappear in Cuba, after the Revolution. 0:11:26.753,0:11:32.698 All the periodicals were nationalized or Fidel Castro expropriated them but the magazine Bohemia continued to exist. 0:11:32.698,0:11:37.551 She worked on that magazine when, in its time, it had the cream of the crop of Cuba journalism: 0:11:37.551,0:11:43.170 Enrique de la Osa, Enrique Capetillo, Mario Cuchilang, in short it was a school. 0:11:43.170,0:11:48.474 And I grew up there, because I was such a clown she had to take me with her to work. 0:11:48.474,0:11:53.713 When she had to work or report around the whole country… the journalism came to me through her, I had to, no? 0:11:53.713,0:12:00.074 I had to because if I’m a journalist it’s because of her, because I grew up well with her. 0:12:00.074,0:12:04.184 When I was about 12 or 13 so I wouldn’t get bored or when I was being punished... 0:12:04.184,0:12:07.574 ...she’d put me to transcribing things, tape recordings, which is very heavy. 0:12:07.574,0:12:12.102 And she told me: Take the typewriter and learn to use it and put a recording there to transcribe. 0:12:12.102,0:12:16.836 So by the time I was 15 I knew how to type. 0:12:16.836,0:12:28.565 The journalism… opinions, that is politics, we agree more than 70 percent of the time, but we do have disagreements. 0:12:28.565,0:12:31.499 You know, children reflect their times, not their parents, right. 0:12:32.837,0:12:37.190 A very good question, I haven’t situated myself on the map of the Cuban blogosphere. 0:12:37.190,0:12:40.593 I see myself as someone pretty independent and pretty honest with myself. 0:12:40.593,0:12:50.136 That is I don’t fool around with a whole series of… I say what I think. And of course that has brought me problems with the Cuban dissidence. 0:12:50.136,0:12:58.612 And also I’ve done work that the government is very critical of, but those are my points of view. 0:12:58.612,0:13:03.488 And I place myself in… well I don’t belong to any portal, I don’t belong to any group… 0:13:03.488,0:13:06.454 I’m an independent blogger and I’m also an independent journalist. 0:13:06.454,0:13:08.612 I work on my own, I prefer to go my own way. 0:13:08.758,0:13:11.224 Yes, terribly fractured. 0:13:11.224,0:13:21.409 And what pisses me off is not the divide over political issues, if not many times divided by purely material things. 0:13:21.409,0:13:24.242 To see who’s in favor with the U.S. government.. 0:13:24.242,0:13:28.271 … to see who can pass the hat, collect more money from the European Union or the U.S. 0:13:28.271,0:13:34.553 That's what pisses me off, there's no... and there is, in, fact and they don't know how to take advantage of it. 0:13:34.553,0:13:38.097 For me, it's my opinion, the things we agree on are many. 0:13:38.097,0:13:45.124 People want, many people would like a democratic Cuba, or to make a number of improvements within the country to drive a common project. 0:13:45.124,0:13:53.852 If one doesn’t get in on the racket, the discrediting, the politics of pimping, of gossip. 0:13:53.852,0:14:02.908 It doesn't make a real lobby, a politics to try to find a way out for Cuba. 0:14:02.908,0:14:07.759 Because they all propose changes but no one has a project. What changes? How can this change come about? 0:14:07.759,0:14:10.254 How can there be this change? 0:14:10.254,0:14:15.503 Because if you put it on Tracey from a point of view there are many more things we agree on… 0:14:15.503,0:14:19.394 …the ideology we have, opponents, Marxists, communists, than things that separate us. 0:14:19.394,0:14:24.154 Because of we all have suffered with cojones (I like to say curse words) with the bad transport… 0:14:24.154,0:14:29.285 With how 60% of the water is lost and never reaches the houses… 0:14:29.285,0:14:35.408 … with the state of housing, that 65% is in fair to poor condition, with the bad job the government has made of the economic plan… 0:14:35.408,0:14:41.940 I think this affects us all, how the quality of public health has declined, which was one of the prides of Fidel Castro’s Revolution. 0:14:41.940,0:14:48.117 Even sports, because how… what I wonder is how the government can be so stupid as to allow them to desert after training them for 15 years… 0:14:48.117,0:14:52.158 … instead of allowing them to compete on their own… and even putting a tax on it. 0:14:52.158,0:15:06.465 There’s a whole range of things that I think the dissidents and those loyal to the government, more or less think the same thing. 0:15:06.973,0:15:13.148 And I don’t think the dissidence takes advantage of this. Look, I don’t have any relationship with the U.S. Interest Section [USIS]. 0:15:13.148,0:15:17.950 I remember that in 15 years I only went once to a reception and I went because because I wanted to eat something. 0:15:17.950,0:15:21.487 I said, well, a good day to drink or eat something, that they always have there. 0:15:21.487,0:15:24.061 And Raul said to me: “Coño, look how the other half lives.” 0:15:24.061,0:15:27.827 But I’ve never had contacts with USIS, I barely have relations, or I don’t have, in fact… 0:15:27.827,0:15:33.117 … with the cultural attaché here in the press of the Interest Office in Havana. 0:15:33.117,0:15:36.461 This subject, I can’t tell you anything about it. 0:15:36.461,0:15:41.421 From friends who are independent journalists and they do go once a week to USIS to surf the Internet... 0:15:41.421,0:15:45.563 ...they say they are treated very respectfully and professionally. 0:15:45.563,0:15:50.068 But there have been very big differences with Bush and now Obama. 0:15:50.068,0:15:56.489 I think I’ll stick with Obama, he’s a guy I personally admire greatly, especially for how well he writes. 0:15:56.489,0:16:06.275 I read his two books, The Audacity of Hope and Dreams From My Father, which he wrote. More is expected, no? 0:16:06.275,0:16:12.138 I’m not just looking at it from the point of view of Cuba, I think, for me, he’s done enough, or what he promised. 0:16:12.138,0:16:17.862 That is, he removed all those absurd things implemented by George W. Bush… 0:16:17.862,0:16:22.138 … who for me was the worst president the U.S. had in the 20th century... 0:16:22.138,0:16:26.586 ...and a little more but you have to see that Obama is threatened by a bestial crisis… 0:16:26.586,0:16:30.795 … that the pockets of U.S. consumers are paralyzed… 0:16:30.795,0:16:40.032 …with serious problems you already know, in the Middle East, North Africa, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan… 0:16:40.032,0:16:43.359 I think Cuba is on his agenda, decidedly. 0:16:44.837,0:16:55.084 Well, I read Andrew Sullivan, I read you, Yuma of Ted Henken I also read, but I like the American press the most. 0:16:55.084,0:17:00.319 That is, from the United States what I read most is the press, because it’s journalism that motivates me. 0:17:00.319,0:17:11.941 Especially Time magazine, New Juice in Spanish, I read when I can. The New York Times that every journalist takes his hat off to. 0:17:11.941,0:17:17.978 I don’t know, Gary Taylor, The New York Times, the Washington Post. 0:17:17.978,0:17:20.695 Yes, yes, it’s a paradigm for me. 0:17:20.695,0:17:25.595 I’m trying to do journalism, bridging the gap, because I know in this business you learn something every day. 0:17:25.595,0:17:29.658 The journalism I admire is American journalism. 0:17:29.658,0:17:39.759 Short sentences, trying to get the ideas as clear as possible… it has always been the journalism that to me, personally, I’m a fan. 0:17:39.759,0:17:46.948 I’m a follower of that kind of journalism, Although there are things I don’t like but really, I greatly admire it.